Built In Smoke Detectors

In any given home the smoke detectors are in a fixed location. Based on the home layout there are certain places in which a detector is going to be found (such as near the stove). Yet, in most cases, smoke detectors are dinky plastic things screwed to the ceiling. They seem to be built under the assumption that people are going to be wanting to move their smoke detectors around from place to place.

This is a problem. The most common reason smoke detectors fail is because their batteries are low. The reason they have batteries in the first place is because they are non permanent fixtures in the home.

There is an easy fix for this. Smoke detectors can be built into the ceiling of homes and apartments. They can draw power directly from the electrical grid. There would be no need to have batteries. There would never be a question of "is there a smoke detector there?"

The easiest thing would be to install them while the home is being constructed. However, if there were electrical lines in the ceiling installing it after the fact would be no harder than installing a ceiling fan (easier in fact). As far as costs go, such a device would not run much more expensive than a regular smoke detector. However, the companies who manufacture smoke detectors would likely want to jack up the price because they would not sell as many in the lifetime of a home.

Similar systems already exist in commercial establishments. There is no reason they should not exist in homes.  They could save lives.

Safer Lawnmowers

Lawnmowers are essentially giant whirling death blades with nothing to prevent non-grass things from 'falling' into them.

A lot of electric razors have metal meshes designed to pull in hairs, but keep the blades away from the skin. Something like this could work well on a lawnmower. The holes in the mesh could be fairly large. They would need to be just small enough to make it hard to stick your finger through.

Not only would this reduce the chance of people having unfortunate accidents with lawn mowers but it could also reduce the chance of other problems. It would be a lot harder to run over a lawn hose for example. Rocks and branches wouldn't get sucked up and spit out.

To get it to work, the grill should not be horizontal, but rather at a slight angle to help catch the grass rather than just push it down.

Such a device could be sold in a kit that could be retrofitted to existing lawn mowers or come pre-attached.

With safer lawnmowers it could become more reasonable to have automated Roomba like lawnmowers without worrying about them killing us all.